September 2013 Goals
Leadership
2014 Leadership Training
Two years into this little side project and I’m very happy to say we’re going to go for a third. This year we took a new group of 20 through Everyone Communicates/Few Connect and the group of 18 from last year through Leading Change. We (now a team of 3 passionate facilitators) are discussing options for an Emotional Intelligence book for next year as well as adding a new group to the mix. I also feel like we could do two series every year so we’ll also discuss time, budget and all of those constraints.
Management
Computer World’s Data+ Conference is back in town again and this time around the focus is on big data. I’m looking forward to lots of chats on Hadoops, listening to practical advice from companies like; Oversee, QVerity, ESRI and Express Scripts, and getting to mingle with some hard core data geeks.
We got word last week of a happy resolution to our SharePoint limbo; part of my 2014 project preparation will be doing some due diligence on where our SharePoint sites will be going in the future. There is going to be a large push for integration with our corporate sites (a totally separate environment), my plan is to be as well informed as I can be.
Projects
The biggest, most common, and endlessly frustrating part of BI projects is the purgatory we call parallel, where newly developed reports or warehouses are run in production mode and compared either daily or weekly to existing (but outdated) reports and warehouses. It can be deadly in cases where the business logic is changing rapidly or where the existing counterpart is vastly different from the new. I call it “death by a thousand what abouts”. We’ve all been doing this long enough that we typically take a month or so to do variance research prior to parallel (yes a pre-parallel-parallel) with users involved but it’s still as time consuming. September should bring four projects to this stage.
Personal
In March, I was granted approval to take the PMI-ACP exam and am now in the last stages of studying – my test is scheduled for Oct. I feel confident that I have the Agile concepts down but have been struggling with setting aside the time to do a refresher on all of the PMP concepts that neatly left my brain when I passed that test seven or so years ago. This month I’m going to revisit my reading list, dust off some PMP flash cards and focus on getting at least an hour set aside a day to prepare.
Taarradhin 